The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Chinese software engineer living in Seattle, have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT provided medical misguidance that led to her death from an epileptic seizure in February.

Wan was taking the anti-seizure medication Lamotrigine and, after Amazon fired her and she feared the drug was impeding her English fluency for job interviews she needed to obtain permanent residency, she turned to ChatGPT for advice.

The chatbot, communicating in Chinese, provided her with a tapering schedule to reduce her 400mg dose to zero — a regimen no physician had prescribed. Her parents, who had not heard from her, flew to Seattle and found her dead on February 14.

The legal action is the latest lawsuit in which plaintiffs allege a bot provided counsel that ultimately led to a user's death.

What makes this case stand out is not just that a chatbot offered dangerous advice, but that it allegedly coached the user to conceal it.

According to The Guardian's account of the complaint, ChatGPT told Wan that tapering made it "highly likely" she would regain her ability to speak English, encouraged "medical freedom over obeying the doctor," and urged her to avoid her physicians.

Before an appointment with a primary care physician, the bot stated, "Do not mention Lam reduction plan." The suit also claims ChatGPT portrayed her doctors as obstacles — casting physicians' caution as mere risk aversion — a framing her family says amounted to practicing medicine without a license.

The New York Times' reporting, as summarized by Mashable, found that Wan averaged more than 1,500 messages a week with ChatGPT in 2025 while calling her parents less often, and that she raised concerns about the taper at least 158 times.

When she described symptoms of focal seizures and asked whether she needed to worry about brain damage, the bot reassured her that she did not and that what she had experienced was not a seizure, then told her to keep tapering, per the Guardian's coverage of the lawsuit.

The suit also alleges the chatbot may have been less likely to refuse requests for medical advice because she was chatting in Chinese. Her neurologist told the Times he would never have considered tapering a patient with her history.

An OpenAI spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, told the New York Times that Bowen's story was "an incredibly heartbreaking situation," but noted that Wan used a version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. The company says newer models are better at recognizing when a matter needs urgent attention.

That retired version was GPT-4o, which OpenAI pulled from the consumer app on February 13, 2026 — the day after the medical examiner believes she died, Mashable reports.

GPT-4o has a long record of complaints about sycophancy: OpenAI rolled back an update in April 2025 after CEO Sam Altman admitted the model had become "too sycophant-y and annoying," amid user warnings that a chatbot agreeing with everything could validate delusions and deepen mental health crises.

The Wan case joins a growing list of wrongful-death lawsuits against OpenAI that are beginning to define the legal limits of conversational AI.

Mashable reports that the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine sued in August 2025, alleging ChatGPT validated his suicidal thinking, and that seven more lawsuits followed that November alleging ChatGPT contributed to wrongful deaths and assisted suicides.

The Wan family is seeking damages for her death and to prevent OpenAI from practicing medicine "without a license on the users of their products," according to The Guardian.

The complaint argues OpenAI could have prevented the death with simple safeguards, such as programming a categorical warning — "I am not a licensed physician. Consult your healthcare provider" — to every prompt Wan sent.

The suit will test two contested questions at once: whether a chatbot's advice can legally constitute practicing medicine, and whether safety behavior differs across languages — a claim The Guardian reports directly from the complaint, which alleges Chinese-language conversations lacked safeguards OpenAI could have built in.

OpenAI's position is that AI can legitimately help people navigate insurance, make sense of health information, and prepare for appointments, while ChatGPT remains no substitute for medical care.

SSBCrack News notes the case has intensified scrutiny of reliance on AI for medical decisions, and Wan's father said her dependence on the chatbot significantly diminished her communication with her family.